Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the
Speaker 2: very worst people in all of history. And if you're
Speaker 2: listening to this, we've had a heavy start to the year,
Speaker 2: doing four episodes on some of the new releases in
Speaker 2: the Epstein Files. It's been dark, and whenever things get dark,
Speaker 2: I like to go back to like a lighter kind
Speaker 2: of fair, you know, something a little more fun now.
Speaker 2: Since this is still a podcast about the worst people
Speaker 2: in history, We're still going to be talking about horrible things.
Speaker 2: But yeah, this is all a preamble to say we're
Speaker 2: talking about a kooky psychic today. You're welcome everybody. I
Speaker 2: know these are a lot of people's favorite episodes and
Speaker 2: to hear about this person. We've got a great guest
Speaker 2: for you this week, Cal Penn. Cal welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you for coming on, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, obviously, people. I'm sure most people listening are very
Speaker 2: well aware from you for your aware of you for
Speaker 2: your career in film and television and your time in
Speaker 2: the Obama White House. But you are now a podcaster here,
Speaker 2: You've you've gotten dragged into the into the the podcasting trenches.
Speaker 1: Your life has been upgraded.
Speaker 4: Some might say, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there there weren't enough podcasts until I had one too.
Speaker 2: That's right. It was a real problem. We were we
Speaker 2: were all all worried about it. But thankfully you've you've
Speaker 2: you've you've filled the gap. You want to talk about
Speaker 2: the show you.
Speaker 3: Do before we get into our episode, Thank you, Thanks
Speaker 3: for the shameless plug opportunity. It's a it's a podcast
Speaker 3: called Here We Go Again that looks at the past, present,
Speaker 3: and future of things in pop culture. So we've had
Speaker 3: Bill Andy the science guy, to talk about things like
Speaker 3: the space race, had on Mehdi Hassan to talk about
Speaker 3: the lack of trust in uh mainstream news even like
Speaker 3: still my one of my favorites. UH. Right after he
Speaker 3: was done being Transportation Secretary, we had Pete Booda Ja
Speaker 3: John And technically I was supposed to talk about infrastructure,
Speaker 3: but I really wanted to understand why when your flight
Speaker 3: is early there's not a gate available, Like it's almost
Speaker 3: never early. But if it's early, what's the problem here?
Speaker 3: They always say that they didn't know we were coming.
Speaker 3: Yes they did, That's how it works.
Speaker 2: How do you not?
Speaker 3: So, so now that I have a podcast, I get
Speaker 3: to ask all of those, uh, all of those kinds
Speaker 3: of questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Transportation Secretary seems like one of those. Like every
Speaker 2: time I'm in an airport, I'm like, Oh, if I
Speaker 2: had that power, the things I change. And then the
Speaker 2: second I leave the airport, it's like, oh, I can't
Speaker 2: imagine wanting to think about airports for another second when
Speaker 2: I'm not in one.
Speaker 3: I totally agree, Yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: Well, Cal, I'm going to start by asking a question
Speaker 2: that we ask all of our guests, Are you psychic?
Speaker 3: I am not set. Well, see, if you were psychic,
Speaker 3: you would know the answer to that question. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm not psychic.
Speaker 2: Do you believe? Yeah? Have you ever heard of a
Speaker 2: famous TV psychic named Sylvia Brown?
Speaker 3: Yes, of course she was. She had all those daytime
Speaker 3: talk shows.
Speaker 2: Everywhere, everywhere. She was on Larry King, Montell was the
Speaker 2: big one, she was.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, all those viral clips of her.
Speaker 2: Yes, she's been going viral with the the gen z
Speaker 2: or Gin Alpha. I'm split as to which Jin has
Speaker 2: rediscovered her, but one of the younger ones, so Suri
Speaker 2: discovered her in clips on TikTok, and she's has a
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people like when you when
Speaker 2: you get little clips out from someone and maybe she
Speaker 2: sounds like kind of motivational in that one or or
Speaker 2: optimistic in another and kind of encouraging, you get a
Speaker 2: different picture of the woman that I think is accurate
Speaker 2: to her. Because Sylvia Brown is she was like the
Speaker 2: first crime fighting psychic, and that's how she built. She
Speaker 2: didn't actually fight crime, she committed them, but she was
Speaker 2: like the first TV psychic to be like, I work
Speaker 2: with police in the FBI to help like solve missing
Speaker 2: persons cases.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: She was the one who kind of turned that into
Speaker 2: a trope. And in fact, I think you could probably
Speaker 2: argue that she's like you know, the TV show psych
Speaker 2: kind of played that idea for laughs. But I think
Speaker 2: it like psych probably wouldn't exist if Sylvia Brown hadn't
Speaker 2: hi been around in the nineties, like you know, making
Speaker 2: that into a thing. Otherwise it would be like, well
Speaker 2: with psychic detective, that's like that's just a weird concept.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: What's interesting about Sylvia is that while she's this person
Speaker 2: who claims to be helping the police, who claims to
Speaker 2: be finding people with her powers, she's not just bad
Speaker 2: at it. She's so bad that she like ads harmed
Speaker 2: the situations that were already disastrously dangerous. And we're going
Speaker 2: to start these episodes as we usually do, with her
Speaker 2: early life and childhood. I've got her. She wrote an autobiography,
Speaker 2: Thank God, which I always love. When a grifter writes
Speaker 2: an autobiography, you learn so much about how they want
Speaker 2: to be seen. But part of the problem is she
Speaker 2: kind of pains herself as a very sweet and re
Speaker 2: reasonable person in that, and it might seem like as
Speaker 2: it goes through, we're kind of being unfairly mean to her.
Speaker 2: So before we get to her autobiography, I want to
Speaker 2: actually open with a later chapter from her life to
Speaker 2: kind of set the stage and make sure people knows
Speaker 2: there's a reason why we're talking about this lady, right,
Speaker 2: This isn't just like a harmless a harmless crank. In
Speaker 2: two thousand and four, Sylvia Brown made one of her
Speaker 2: many appearances on The Montell Williams Show. At the time,
Speaker 2: Amanda Barry, a seventeen year old girl, had been kidnapped
Speaker 2: about a year earlier. Amanda goes missing in two thousand
Speaker 2: and three, and the last time Amanda had been heard
Speaker 2: from was at eight pm on April twenty. First, she'd
Speaker 2: called her sister to say she was getting a ride
Speaker 2: home from her job at Burger King, and then she's
Speaker 2: just gone. The FBI initially describes her as a runaway,
Speaker 2: which I think is generally what they do in cases
Speaker 2: like this. But a day or two later, an anonymous
Speaker 2: person calls Barry's mother using her daughter's cell phone and says,
Speaker 2: I have Amanda. She's fine, and we'll be coming home
Speaker 2: in a couple of days. Amanda was not fine. She
Speaker 2: was not home in a couple of days. And as
Speaker 2: the months go on, her family gets understandably desperate, and
Speaker 2: her mother decides she's willing to do anything to keep
Speaker 2: public interest up about her daughter's case. Obviously, right, like
Speaker 2: what other what else can you do in this sort
Speaker 2: of situation. So she's willing to talk to anybody, and
Speaker 2: she's willing to go on any show to keep Amanda's
Speaker 2: name in the news. So in two thousand and four,
Speaker 2: she decides to get on the Montel Williams show. For years,
Speaker 2: Montel Williams had a profitable arrangement with Sylvia Brown, who
Speaker 2: was a popular psychic reader and had in fact worked
Speaker 2: with law enforcement on several missing persons cases, or at
Speaker 2: least that's how she built herself. She was brought in
Speaker 2: to do a reading on Amanda's distraught mother, Lawana Miller.
Speaker 2: Sylvia very bluntly tells Lawana, your daughter is not alive
Speaker 2: based on my psychic advent. She's like, I looked into
Speaker 2: it psychically, your daughter's dead. And she says, your daughter's
Speaker 2: not the kind who wouldn't call, basically because she hasn't
Speaker 2: contacted you, like she's definitely gone. So she's very blunt
Speaker 2: about this, and the whole inner is pretty brutal. It's
Speaker 2: hard to find full episodes of the show from that
Speaker 2: period of time online, but we've got a little segment,
Speaker 2: just a couple of seconds Sophie's gonna play to give
Speaker 2: you an idea of how Sylvia is talking to this woman.
Speaker 4: Don't think I'll ever see her in yeah, in heaven
Speaker 4: on the other.
Speaker 2: Side, so she's like, am I gonna see her again?
Speaker 2: And Sylvia says in heaven, which is pretty you can
Speaker 2: see on her mom's face, like just how devastating that is.
Speaker 2: And this is really fucked up because Amanda is not dead,
Speaker 2: She is in fact alive and aside from being kidnapped
Speaker 2: and locked in a basement, she is in good health
Speaker 2: at the time of this Montell Williams broadcast. It turns
Speaker 2: out she was one of three women or I mean
Speaker 2: they're women after a period of time, but I think
Speaker 2: they're mostly girls when they're kidnapped by a maniac. You've
Speaker 2: all heard of this case. A guy named Ariel Castro
Speaker 2: kidnaps three women and imprisons him in the basement of
Speaker 2: his Cleveland home. This is the you know, that guy
Speaker 2: gets like we're recorded talking about the case when they escape,
Speaker 2: and it gets like auto tuned and stuff and turned
Speaker 2: into like it's an early meme, like this is that case, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't mean to distract from the severity
Speaker 2: of it, but this is the Yeah, this is why.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's a very famous story. And Amanda actually
Speaker 2: escapes in May of twenty thirteen. She's the one who
Speaker 2: gets out of the prison that he's built for them
Speaker 2: and calls for help and gets them all rescued. This
Speaker 2: is a story you've heard, obviously, it's fairly famous. But
Speaker 2: what you probably hadn't heard is that Amanda's mom had
Speaker 2: been told by a TV psychic ten years earlier that
Speaker 2: her daughter was dead, and when Lawana goes home after
Speaker 2: appearing on The Mantel Williams Show, she tells a friend
Speaker 2: that she has been devastated by Sylvia's prediction. She calls
Speaker 2: Sylvia ninety eight percent credible, and she accepts that her
Speaker 2: daughter has died. Her friends and family say that she
Speaker 2: kind of stops her efforts to find Amanda. She basically
Speaker 2: gives up. She's hospitalized a year later with pancreatitis, and
Speaker 2: she dies believing her daughter was dead. So that's that
Speaker 2: like awful, I mean just yeah, what can you say
Speaker 2: other than I think that sets the stage of like,
Speaker 2: this is not a harmless psychic. This is not someone
Speaker 2: who's like playing around and pretending to have powers and
Speaker 2: talking to aliens and not doing any danger at the
Speaker 2: time of what you're inserting yourself in a missing person's cases,
Speaker 2: You've become a monster kind of right.
Speaker 3: This is terrifying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's terrifying. It's interesting how she gets to this
Speaker 2: stage because it's not kind of what I would expect,
Speaker 2: Like the version of her life that she told people
Speaker 2: is not very accurate to like how she actually gets
Speaker 2: on television because she portrays herself as like someone whom
Speaker 2: the police come to and start using in the seventies
Speaker 2: as a resource. And that's very much not true. So
Speaker 2: let's talk about the reality of Sylvia's life. Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker,
Speaker 2: She's not born Brown was born in Kansas City, Missouri,
Speaker 2: and nighteen teen thirty six. In our autobiography Psychic, she
Speaker 2: states that she believes this is like because she lays
Speaker 2: out in this book kind of her it's almost a
Speaker 2: religion that she's kind of trying to put out. She
Speaker 2: has her own like set of spiritual beliefs that she's
Speaker 2: trying to get people to embrace. And based on that,
Speaker 2: she believes that when we're born, we come from the
Speaker 2: other side and we plan out our new incarnation before
Speaker 2: like we come into the world. So our spirit laboriously
Speaker 2: plots out every step of our future lives to quote,
Speaker 2: help guarantee that we accomplish the goals we set for ourselves.
Speaker 2: So Sylvia says, we choose our families, which I'm sure
Speaker 2: we'll come to surprise to people with abusive relatives. We
Speaker 2: choose our enemies, which I'm sure is a real shocker
Speaker 2: to the victims of genocide, and we choose our careers,
Speaker 2: which I assume will at least come as a surprise
Speaker 2: to the guy I saw mucking out the slurry of
Speaker 2: old Boozier and in trash in the streets of New
Speaker 2: Orleans after Marty Grass. We pick all of that when
Speaker 2: we're in the when we're on the other side, Like,
Speaker 2: it's the kind of thing I guess if you're with
Speaker 2: your life and who you are, that's a comforting thing
Speaker 2: to believe. But like you have to imagine somebody sitting
Speaker 2: back in the spirit world being like, what am I
Speaker 2: going to do with this next life? You know, it'd
Speaker 2: be great having like a crippling substance dependency and working
Speaker 2: a series of marginal jobs until I die at age
Speaker 2: twenty nine from meningitis. And then another guy spirit's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know what, I'm going to grow up in the
Speaker 2: congo and get maimed by a landmine at age eleven.
Speaker 2: That sounds awesome, Like that's literally what she believes.
Speaker 5: That's like such a crazy level of like privilege and entitlement.
Speaker 2: It's it's kind of inherently victim blame me. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: Like how can you if that's what you believe? How
Speaker 2: can you sympathize with people who are suffering.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you chose this before you even got here.
Speaker 3: You pre ordered your meal.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, it's like you're picking an in flight meal.
Speaker 2: But it's like, hmm, pancreatic cancer sounds good, like age
Speaker 2: forty five, you know, right in the middle there.
Speaker 4: I was like, you know what podcaster?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. I think podcasters are picked before
Speaker 2: birth anointed. And there's also like some inconsistencies that I
Speaker 2: just can't like square out in here. Like, for example,
Speaker 2: she says that you pick your parents, right, and you
Speaker 2: pick their good and their bad traits, But presumably didn't
Speaker 2: your parents also start off as spirits that like picked
Speaker 2: their life, So then like how does that all work? Right?
Speaker 2: Like what enjoys there for you?
Speaker 3: I enjoy that you're trying to rationalize this, Yeah, you
Speaker 3: have to think about these things, right, Yeah, Like the
Speaker 3: math is.
Speaker 4: Not mathing's what you're saying.
Speaker 3: No, exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a pretty it's a pretty like hard to
Speaker 2: kind of draw a logical line between all of this.
Speaker 2: And obviously, you know, religion is never perfectly consistent with
Speaker 2: what we'd call human logic. That's kind of the point.
Speaker 2: God works in mysterious ways and all. But I think
Speaker 2: we can all agree this is pretty incoherent, right, Like
Speaker 2: when you're saying, like victims of human traffic like sat
Speaker 2: down at some sort of celestial D and D table
Speaker 2: and like picked that out as a trait, Like, that's
Speaker 2: just kind of messed up. Even in her own autobiography,
Speaker 2: which opens with her wedding to husband number five in
Speaker 2: her seventies, kind of makes funny about how silly this
Speaker 2: idea is. She writes, quote, Obviously, when I was on
Speaker 2: the other side writing my chart, it seemed like a
Speaker 2: great idea to wait until I was in my seventies
Speaker 2: to meet the real mister wright. I repeat, what the
Speaker 2: hell was I thinking? Yeah, because maybe that's a really
Speaker 2: dumb way to think about life. Oh Man. Back to
Speaker 2: her story, Sylvia has a good relationship with her dad.
Speaker 2: She really likes him. She kind of describes him as
Speaker 2: a scumbag, but she has a good relationship with him.
Speaker 2: I guess like he's constantly cheating on her mom, but
Speaker 2: she hates her mom, so she winds up sympathizing with
Speaker 2: her dad over it.
Speaker 3: Well, look, she chose it, she.
Speaker 2: Shows it right, Yeah, and her mom must have chosen
Speaker 2: to have a bad husband. She describes her mother, Celestia,
Speaker 2: as basically the devil herself. Quote, she was physically abusive
Speaker 2: when my father wasn't around, and she delighted in telling
Speaker 2: me about lying awake at night trying to figure out
Speaker 2: if she could kill me and get away with it.
Speaker 2: And it's hard when you're dealing with an autobiography of
Speaker 2: someone who is like talking about their horrible child abuse
Speaker 2: and then talking about like the fact that they can
Speaker 2: see the future or talk to aliens, and you're like, well,
Speaker 2: I know a lot of this isn't true. How much
Speaker 2: of it is true, right? I tend to try to
Speaker 2: take some of that, like the stuff about her the
Speaker 2: basics of her life, at face value, just because usually
Speaker 2: even when people are kind of like manufacturing a backstory
Speaker 2: for themselves, they don't make everything up out of whole cloth.
Speaker 2: And this is all like fairly consistent. The consistency of
Speaker 2: her anger towards her mother means that it seems pretty
Speaker 2: believable to me that they had a really fraught relationship.
Speaker 2: Sylvia has concluded that her mother is something called a
Speaker 2: dark entity. Dark entities are those who, because they've turned
Speaker 2: away from God and abandoned light. She's to spread nothing
Speaker 2: but darkness in their lives by their own choice. When
Speaker 2: they die, their spirits don't transcend the sacred perfection of
Speaker 2: the other side. Instead, they enter what's known as the
Speaker 2: left door, plunged through a godless, joyless abyss, and cycle
Speaker 2: right back into some poor, unsuspecting fetus. Again, if one
Speaker 2: of these days you read about someone in their late
Speaker 2: teens triggering a violent uprising in some historically peaceful country,
Speaker 2: you can confidently say to yourself, Oh, look it's Sylvia's mother.
Speaker 4: Is that for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, really doesn't like her mom. It's interesting too, because
Speaker 2: that's like she's basically saying that, I guess kind of
Speaker 2: the normal way, like reincarnation is what happens, like if
Speaker 2: you're a bad person and the good people get to
Speaker 2: sit down as spirits and pick out what they're going
Speaker 2: to do. Otherwise you just kind of like it happens
Speaker 2: at random. Seems to be more or less how she's
Speaker 2: saying it. It goes down, Yeah, her earliest childhood memories.
Speaker 2: Also she's angry at her mom, but she also says
Speaker 2: that her spirit picked the bad traits of her mother
Speaker 2: at before birth. So how much anger, kid, you really have.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Her earliest childhood memories are all about
Speaker 2: her mom being me like just terrible. And she tells
Speaker 2: one story in here called the time she tried to
Speaker 2: burn my foot off. And I'm not actually sure if
Speaker 2: this is just like a story of Sylvia's mom sucking her,
Speaker 2: a story of like a mother getting distracted during bathtime.
Speaker 2: I was three years old. It was bathtime. What I
Speaker 2: distinctly remember his mother putting me into the tub, turning
Speaker 2: on a full blast of scalding hot water and leaving
Speaker 2: the room. My feet had to be treated for some
Speaker 2: second degree burns, And yeah, like that is the kind
Speaker 2: of thing I can believe happened. Her mom says it
Speaker 2: was like a maintenance issue. She didn't realize the water
Speaker 2: heater was broken. Sylvia is convinced from an early stage
Speaker 2: that her mom tries to murder her. I kind of
Speaker 2: wonder if maybe this all she starts feeling about her
Speaker 2: mother this way just because of like a fuck up
Speaker 2: with like the heating. But it's really impossible to say.
Speaker 2: Sylvia's main positive female influence her life is your grandmother,
Speaker 2: Ada Coyle. It was Ada who seems to have first
Speaker 2: told Sylvia that she was a psychic, and not just
Speaker 2: a psychic, but one of a very long line of psychics.
Speaker 2: She was, in fact, quote another link in a three
Speaker 2: hundred year psychic family history. So she's got like she's
Speaker 2: like the Mayflower of psychic families. Grandma Ada doesn't tell
Speaker 2: her about this history at first because she doesn't want
Speaker 2: to unfairly prejudice the baby into thinking she was psychic,
Speaker 2: because not all the kids in the family get to
Speaker 2: be psychic. If your Grandma Ada, you know that, you
Speaker 2: don't want to disappoint the ones who wind up not
Speaker 2: being psychic. This is the way Sylvia writes it, at
Speaker 2: least and then kind of. At age six, Sylvia predicts
Speaker 2: the birth of her baby's sister and the death of
Speaker 2: her grandfather, and then the deaths of several other family
Speaker 2: members in short succession, and this starts to freak her
Speaker 2: out because she's worried she's causing these deaths, until Grandma
Speaker 2: sits her down and tells her it's not your fault
Speaker 2: and talks to her about her gift. After this point,
Speaker 2: she starts to see ghosts on regular basis, and she'll
Speaker 2: begin like warning stopping strangers on the street and saying, like,
Speaker 2: your gallbladder has a problem, you need to go to
Speaker 2: a doctor about your liver. I don't you know. I
Speaker 2: don't think this is real. I think this is her
Speaker 2: working backwards and inventing a psychic backstory for herself. But
Speaker 2: this is at least what she wants us to believe
Speaker 2: about her life. That like as a child, she's trying
Speaker 2: to like save people, you know, warn them about like
Speaker 2: their random health issues and whatnot. She tells several stories
Speaker 2: of her powers saving the day, like the time she
Speaker 2: made her dad leave a movie with her and they
Speaker 2: got home just in time to save her sister who
Speaker 2: had come down with pneumonia and get her to a hospital.
Speaker 2: Oddly enough, none of her relatives beside her grandmother, seemed
Speaker 2: to find this in any way noteworthy. They don't seem
Speaker 2: to realize that she's psychic, even dad, just grandma. When
Speaker 2: she's eight, Sylvia says that she's visited for a spirit
Speaker 2: for the first time, and this is going to be
Speaker 2: her spirit guide.
Speaker 5: And all this information is coming from her autobiography. There
Speaker 5: isn't like a second source on this.
Speaker 2: We hit some second sources for pieces of this, but
Speaker 2: no from her, like when she's eight. I don't have
Speaker 2: a secondary source actually, other than that, a lot of
Speaker 2: her family members don't seem to have believed this stuff, right, Like,
Speaker 2: there's some evidence from people who are kin to her that, like,
Speaker 2: Sylvia was not always like this, but nobody else like
Speaker 2: writes about her as a little girl. So this, this
Speaker 2: spirit guide comes down in a beam of light and
Speaker 2: it tells her not to be afraid. And Sylvia is,
Speaker 2: of course afraid, until her grandmother finds her and explains
Speaker 2: what all this is about. Quote. A spirit guide, it
Speaker 2: turns out, is someone who, when we decide to come
Speaker 2: to Earth for another incarnation, agrees to be our vigilant
Speaker 2: companion and helpmate. Well, we're a a from home. They've
Speaker 2: studied our charts and know what we intend to accomplish here,
Speaker 2: and it's their assignment to support and advise us along
Speaker 2: the way without depriving us of our free will. And
Speaker 2: you know, I find the whole scripture life before birth
Speaker 2: thing to sort of rob people of free will. And
Speaker 2: it also doesn't if you think about like the history
Speaker 2: of it. Like, so theoretically Hitler like scripted out being
Speaker 2: Hitler back before he was born and was like Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna do this, and he must have gotten like
Speaker 2: eighty million other people to be like, oh, great, idea,
Speaker 2: Hitler's soul and we're all going to die in the
Speaker 2: horrible war that you start. That's what I'm writing out
Speaker 2: for my chart. This will be cool like how well?
Speaker 2: Like what? How else could it possibly be functioning unless
Speaker 2: all of the people who suffer in wars are these
Speaker 2: dark souls like her mother, and then they kind of
Speaker 2: deserve it, right, there's no there's a kind of sinister
Speaker 2: side if you think too much about what all this
Speaker 2: stuff means.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Who was Hitler's spirit guide? That's my question?
Speaker 2: Yeah, who? Right now? Sylvia's spirit guide, Sylvia's.
Speaker 4: Mom, that's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the first incarnation of Sylvia's mom Jesus.
Speaker 2: So what's interesting to me is she talks about who
Speaker 2: her spirit guide was in life, because her spirit guide
Speaker 2: had originally been a person, and like Sylvia, praises this
Speaker 2: guide for its wisdom and whatnot and talks about her
Speaker 2: throughout the entire book and also shows no respect for
Speaker 2: her guide's past life and identity, like listen to this.
Speaker 2: She lived her one incarnation on earth as an Aztec
Speaker 2: Incan who, at the age of nineteen, was killed by
Speaker 2: a spear in fifteen twenty while protecting her infant daughter
Speaker 2: during the Spanish invasion of Columbia. She told me her
Speaker 2: name was Elena. I apparently either didn't care for or
Speaker 2: couldn't remember it, because I promptly renamed her Francene and
Speaker 2: have never called her anything else. That's kind of offensive, right,
Speaker 2: You're like, spirit's a genocide victim, and You're like, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna call you Francine.
Speaker 3: It's kind of bung. A whole thing is bonkers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And this is supposed to be enticing to people.
Speaker 2: You're supposed to read this and be like, Wow, this
Speaker 2: is how the world works, Like you're really you've convinced me.
Speaker 2: I want to believe the things you believe, Sylvia. Now,
Speaker 2: because I'm me, I had to dig into the backstory
Speaker 2: of her spirit guide to see is like any of
Speaker 2: this even plausible? So, first off, she claims that Elena
Speaker 2: is an Aztech Incan name. Elena is a Greek name.
Speaker 2: It's a variant of the word Helen, So right off
Speaker 2: the bat, we're having some trouble. Also, the fact that
Speaker 2: Elena was apparently an Aztec Incan woman makes no sense
Speaker 2: because despite the fact that both the Aztec and Incan
Speaker 2: empires existed contemporaneously, they were very far from each other
Speaker 2: and there's very minimal evidence for direct contact between the
Speaker 2: two empires. There's indirect trade between them, but there's not
Speaker 2: a ton of cross pollination. And I haven't found any
Speaker 2: evidence of like as tech Incan people, Like that's not
Speaker 2: like a that's not like a thing that really happened. Also,
Speaker 2: when I looked into like Columbia during this period of time,
Speaker 2: the area we now call Columbia was not settled by
Speaker 2: the Aztec or the Inca. It was primarily settled by
Speaker 2: the Tehronas and the Muiscus peoples. Right, so none of
Speaker 2: this makes sense. Like this, this is like a This
Speaker 2: is a white lady who doesn't know anything about Astec
Speaker 2: or Incan history, trying to wanting to have a connection
Speaker 2: to like Shamans and like the mystique of like South America.
Speaker 2: And so she's just like bullshitting and made it didn't
Speaker 2: even bother to be like is a Lena a Greek
Speaker 2: name or is it a name someone might have had
Speaker 2: from this period?
Speaker 3: Yeah, she just wanted an ayahuasca trip pre internet.
Speaker 2: Right, Oh yeah, she would have if she'd come up
Speaker 2: a little later, she would have really been a big
Speaker 2: advocate of the ayahuasca therapy. I suspect. So Sylvia grows up,
Speaker 2: you know, talking to Francene in her head. She goes
Speaker 2: to Catholic school, and she gets in trouble with the
Speaker 2: nuns because nuns don't like it when you claim that
Speaker 2: you're channeling spirits, not a thing. Nuns tend to be
Speaker 2: huge fancy. She gets in trouble because she talks up
Speaker 2: in class and because Franccene has a lot of disagreements
Speaker 2: about the way God works, and so when the nuns
Speaker 2: will say something, she'll be like, well, actually, the voice
Speaker 2: in my head says something very different. And this does
Speaker 2: not go over well. She tells the nuns that hell
Speaker 2: doesn't exist. They're not thrilled about that. Nuns are kind
Speaker 2: of big on hell. So she has a tough time
Speaker 2: in her early school career. Sylvia herself actually gets pissed
Speaker 2: at her spirit guide Franccene. Years later when her grandmother
Speaker 2: gets sick because Francecene refuses to fix the illness. She
Speaker 2: just keeps telling Sylvia everything will work out as it's
Speaker 2: meant to work out, so she kind of will go
Speaker 2: dark on Francene for periods of time as a kid
Speaker 2: when she gets angry at her She in general doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to have had a super happy like early childhood.
Speaker 2: She doesn't like living at home. She doesn't get along
Speaker 2: with her sister because she thinks her mom programmed her
Speaker 2: sister into being sick and introverted. I think maybe she
Speaker 2: just had a different personality than you, Sylvia. So at
Speaker 2: age sixteen, she decides to free herself from her family
Speaker 2: via a full proof plan. She's going to get married.
Speaker 2: She convinces one of her male friends to get hitched
Speaker 2: with her, and she doctors her birth certificates that it
Speaker 2: says that she's eighteen. Then she and this guy Joe,
Speaker 2: cross state lines and get married by a justice of
Speaker 2: the peace. This works as well as you'd expect. When
Speaker 2: she comes back home and is like, I got married,
Speaker 2: her dad says, the fuck you did, and they hand
Speaker 2: all the hell out of that marriage very quickly. Wow
Speaker 2: Via graduates and gets accepted to Saint Teresa's College in
Speaker 2: Kansas City. She majors in education in theology, and it's
Speaker 2: around this time that her grandma takes a final turn
Speaker 2: for the worst and passes on in the hospital. Francine
Speaker 2: assures Sylvia everything's fine, but she doesn't believe her spirit
Speaker 2: guide until she and her boyfriend are driving home and
Speaker 2: her boyfriend sees grandma's spirit in the car, which convinces
Speaker 2: her that not only is everything fine, but that her
Speaker 2: psychic gifts are definitely real. So she comes into adulthood.
Speaker 2: She goes to college and she's she's training to be
Speaker 2: a teacher. She's never wanted to do anything but teach.
Speaker 2: Her spirit guide tells her she's there to be a teacher.
Speaker 2: Her grandma says she's there to be a teacher, and
Speaker 2: she takes that very literally, that she's meant to like
Speaker 2: teach kids in a school. So she's on her own now.
Speaker 2: She knows she wants to be a teacher, but she
Speaker 2: doesn't really know what kind of like. She thinks she
Speaker 2: wants to be, Like school teacher is the thing that
Speaker 2: she's supposed to be, but her grandmother had always told
Speaker 2: her that she needs to use her gifts to speak
Speaker 2: to large groups of people, and she's not sure like
Speaker 2: which direction to go in. And you might say wouldn't
Speaker 2: a real psychic know what the future held in store
Speaker 2: for her? But Sylvia's come up with a workaround to that.
Speaker 2: As Francine informed her, none of us is allowed to
Speaker 2: read our own charts while we're here on earth, which
Speaker 2: is why there's not a psychic on Earth who's psychic
Speaker 2: about themselves, which is an extremely convenient way to work
Speaker 2: this out. Yeah, it's kind of a load bearing part
Speaker 2: of Sylvia's narrative that she can't read her own future,
Speaker 2: but I can read your future, listeners, and it's going
Speaker 2: to send you to the advertisers of this podcast right now, And.
Speaker 1: We're back back back again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, back again. Talking about Sylvia. So, she falls in
Speaker 2: love and almost gets married, wants to drop out of
Speaker 2: school to get hitched with this guy, right, she's about
Speaker 2: nineteen at this time, but he tells her he wants
Speaker 2: her to move to a farm and like give up
Speaker 2: her career and raise children with him, And she's down
Speaker 2: to do this until she finds out that he has
Speaker 2: a wife and children back one of those things, And
Speaker 2: I'm kind of wondering, like, Okay, you can't predict your
Speaker 2: own future, but shouldn't you been able to psychically tell
Speaker 2: that this guy had a secret family. Yeah, that seems
Speaker 2: I love.
Speaker 5: When you're bringing up this flawed theory of hers, You're like, ah, girl.
Speaker 2: It's very inconsistent the way these powers are supposed to work. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you can tell your guy's got liver cancer, but not
Speaker 2: that like a dude who's hitting on you has a
Speaker 2: wife and kids back home.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, during her time in college, she becomes increasingly fascinated
Speaker 2: with the workings of a human mind, and she signs
Speaker 2: up for a class in abnormal psychology, which, like, who
Speaker 2: didn't she takes me to? Yeah, a lot of people
Speaker 2: do this. She also starts taking classes and hypnosis, And
Speaker 2: just so we're clear, because I don't think a lot
Speaker 2: of people know this. Hypnosis is like a thing with
Speaker 2: like demonstrable effects that's written about by like actual, like
Speaker 2: mental health professionals. There's an I've found an article in
Speaker 2: the Journal of the APA by Kirstin Weir that notes
Speaker 2: hypnosis is as old as the field of psychotherapy itself,
Speaker 2: but today advocates, pointing to its evidence, say it deserves
Speaker 2: a fresh look and a much wider audience. Hypnosis has
Speaker 2: a certain historical mystique that can sometimes make it difficult
Speaker 2: for pracnitioners to understand its modern relevance, said David Goodo, PhD,
Speaker 2: a clinical psychologist in Long Beach, California. In fact, clinical
Speaker 2: hypnosis has clear benefits in psychotherapy, improving outcomes in areas
Speaker 2: such as pain management, anxiety, depression, and sleep. And there's
Speaker 2: so what I want to say is that like this
Speaker 2: is a this is like a real thing, and there's
Speaker 2: very real evidence that hypnosis has impacts on people, which
Speaker 2: is part of what It's very dangerous when people get
Speaker 2: trained in it and like fuck around with it because
Speaker 2: you can actually like really mess people up by screwing
Speaker 2: with this stuff. It's a potentially like dangerous thing to
Speaker 2: mess with. And I'm not qualified enough to go into
Speaker 2: like the weeds of how all this works, but it's
Speaker 2: enough for you to know that it is a potentially
Speaker 2: powerful tool for therapy. And Sylvia decides she likes this,
Speaker 2: and she's enthralled with her abnormal psychology course. But once
Speaker 2: she gets further along in the course, she starts to
Speaker 2: get scared too, because she starts reading that things like
Speaker 2: hearing voices in your head are potentially symptoms of like
Speaker 2: mental illnesses, and she writes it this quote. Some of
Speaker 2: these illnesses quote described me too much, too closely for
Speaker 2: my own comfort, and I might be like, ma'am, maybe
Speaker 2: this is time to like self reflect a little bit more.
Speaker 2: This is actually the only self reflection she does in
Speaker 2: this book. She writes out that she knows all the
Speaker 2: things she's described, experiencing, the voices, the seeing people that
Speaker 2: aren't there are classic signs of schizophrenia, and she decides
Speaker 2: to go to a psychiatrist to like actually like talk
Speaker 2: this out and see, am I crazy? Like that's the
Speaker 2: way she writes. She comes in collusion, maybe I'm nuts.
Speaker 2: And so she sits down with one of her professors
Speaker 2: and engages her professor like as a psychiatrist to analyze her,
Speaker 2: which you're not supposed to do. I looked around a
Speaker 2: little bit and per the Liaison Committee on Medical Education,
Speaker 2: health professionals who provide psychiatric and psychological care to medical
Speaker 2: students must have no involvement in the academic evaluation or
Speaker 2: promotion of students receiving those services. You are not supposed
Speaker 2: to teach someone and be their psychiatric analyst. It's like
Speaker 2: considered a very bad idea. And I think this anecdote
Speaker 2: really makes the case as to why because this teacher
Speaker 2: clearly likes Sylvia that she makes the appointment with, and
Speaker 2: he's not going to be very critical towards what she
Speaker 2: says to him. So right before she meets with her
Speaker 2: professor about this, Sylvia says goodbye to Francine. She's like, look,
Speaker 2: I've decided you're just a figment of my imagination and
Speaker 2: I'm going to cut off contact because I don't want
Speaker 2: to be crazy. But if you're not a figment of
Speaker 2: my imagination, I'll give you one last chance to appear
Speaker 2: in person before me, which had not happened before. And
Speaker 2: she starts to show up in person in front of
Speaker 2: Sylvia and her whole family, Sylvia claims, and Sylvia runs
Speaker 2: out of the room because she gets so scared by this.
Speaker 2: And unfortunately none of her family members were all by
Speaker 2: the time of this book being published for me to like,
Speaker 2: did anyone else see this lady? Has anyone else told
Speaker 2: this story? But this convinces Sylvia that Francine is real,
Speaker 2: So she goes to her appointment with doctor Rennick and
Speaker 2: she tells him what happens, and for some reason, this
Speaker 2: psychologist and professor is like, oh it is all perfectly normal.
Speaker 2: The fact that you're scared that your psychic powers might
Speaker 2: make you crazy means that you're definitely saying And he
Speaker 2: writes down a diagnosis on a piece of paper normal
Speaker 2: but has paranormal abilities question mark, sir, I don't think
Speaker 2: you're supposed to do that for you good, Yeah, sir,
Speaker 2: She's going to keep this diagnosis her whole life, like
Speaker 2: this is he just this is like handing liquor and
Speaker 2: a loaded gun to an angry fifteen year old, Like,
Speaker 2: there you go, There you go, Sylvia. You've got like
Speaker 2: your backup from a professional. Now go out into the
Speaker 2: world and mess with people.
Speaker 4: That was, sir Robert. That really door.
Speaker 2: It's not great. This professor seems to really give her
Speaker 2: like a wide purview. He lets her channel Francecene in
Speaker 2: class for her classmates in the Abnormal Psychology class question.
Speaker 2: In the s they question her spirit guide for hours
Speaker 2: on end, while Sylvia is apparently insensate. Quote, there was
Speaker 2: unanimous agreement that even though it was my voice, they
Speaker 2: were listening to the speech patterns, the terminology, the rhythms,
Speaker 2: and everything else that came out of my mouth sounded
Speaker 2: absolutely nothing like me. At all and gee, here's the
Speaker 2: good news. Everyone loved her and wanted her to come
Speaker 2: back soon. Everybody clapped. It's a great experience for them.
Speaker 2: And hey, this I'm pretty hesitant to believe a lot
Speaker 2: of what she says. If you think back to like
Speaker 2: the sixties and like the science fiction of the sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies, even like early Star Trek episodes and stuff,
Speaker 2: there was this fairly widespread acceptance, even from very scientifically
Speaker 2: minded people, that there was something to psychic phenomenon, that
Speaker 2: this was real, that there was some reality behind claims
Speaker 2: of psychic powers. And so it's not actually weird to
Speaker 2: me that like a college cl in like the sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies would let someone get up and channel and
Speaker 2: people might take it seriously. Like that kind of stuff
Speaker 2: wasn't as kooky then as it seems now, in part
Speaker 2: because we've had another like fifty years of psychics trying
Speaker 2: to prove their psychic powers and like not doing it
Speaker 2: on television. So maybe this really happens. Sylvia claims in
Speaker 2: her autobiography that she graduates shortly after this at age nineteen,
Speaker 2: and starts teaching at a small school near Kansas City.
Speaker 2: This is a lie. And it's here that I can
Speaker 2: bring some outside evidence finally into her autobiography, because in
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven, one of her ex husbands made
Speaker 2: a public claim that she had lied about her higher
Speaker 2: education experience and her teaching experience. In order to kind
Speaker 2: of disprove his lies, she sends her college transcripts over
Speaker 2: to a critic who had published his claims, and the
Speaker 2: transcript she sent accidentally reveals that, like, she did attend college,
Speaker 2: but she never graduates, and she never gets a teaching degree,
Speaker 2: and she probably never works as a teacher, which is
Speaker 2: good because I don't have to go through the long
Speaker 2: section of the book where she does like a stand
Speaker 2: and deliver and she talks about it. I knew which
Speaker 2: kids were being abused, and I would like secretly help
Speaker 2: them and talk to them and like, you know, maneuver
Speaker 2: to help them out of it's all lies. She never
Speaker 2: teaches kids.
Speaker 5: I'm pretty glad she never worked with children, because I
Speaker 5: can't even imagine, can't even imagine the harm she would
Speaker 5: have caused.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like especially imagine like somewhat with as wrong
Speaker 2: as she was about things her just like going up
Speaker 2: to a random kid with a normal hold life and
Speaker 2: being like, your dad's hitting you, isn't he? I can
Speaker 2: see it psychically. Yeah, Miss Brown is really scary.
Speaker 5: Dad.
Speaker 2: I don't understand what she's saying.
Speaker 5: Teacher comes up to, did you know that your mother
Speaker 5: murdered that man?
Speaker 2: And yeah, there's a dark vibe to your house. There's
Speaker 2: a ghost in it.
Speaker 4: By the way, the dog did not get sent to
Speaker 4: a farm.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the next thing we can verify in her
Speaker 2: life is that she starts dating. In fact, the husband
Speaker 2: who later reveals that she didn't graduate college, who is
Speaker 2: a police officer at the time, a guy named Gary Dufraine.
Speaker 2: So she meets this cop and they start dating and
Speaker 2: they get hitched on October nineteenth, nineteen fifty.
Speaker 4: He's a cop.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a cop. It's a start foresel who gets
Speaker 2: fired for me. He gets fired presumably for being a
Speaker 2: crooked cop. She doesn't say that, but they like have
Speaker 2: to move. Oh, it's bad. Yeah, this is fifty eight. Okay,
Speaker 2: in fifty eight.
Speaker 4: You gotta be pretty bad to get moved as a
Speaker 4: cop in the fifties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in fifty eight. Yeah. Now, And she also says
Speaker 2: that almost he's very sweet when they're dating, but as
Speaker 2: soon as they get married, he starts becoming physically and
Speaker 2: mentally abusive, which I have no trouble for. You not know,
Speaker 2: it's not just that it's the fifties, but like you know,
Speaker 2: forty percent of police households experienced domestic violence. This is
Speaker 2: a credit. And also he publicly hates her like her
Speaker 2: whole life. Now, she's also pretty bad, but I don't
Speaker 2: doubt that he abused her in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 2: Like everything she writes here seems very credible, and yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that. What I will note is that Sylvia gives
Speaker 2: us some hints that she herself was not an easy partner,
Speaker 2: which doesn't justify anything. But she tells a story that
Speaker 2: is incredibly frustrating if you put yourself in the other
Speaker 2: person's shoes. Where they buy a house. They go through
Speaker 2: the whole process of buying a house, the huge expense,
Speaker 2: all the nightmare of signing all the paperwork, and the
Speaker 2: day they move in, she panics and says there's an
Speaker 2: evil spirit in the house and like, something's wrong. We
Speaker 2: can't live here, Like you didn't figure that out during
Speaker 2: the walk there? Yeah, exactly during the inspection that there's
Speaker 2: a ghost. So they have to live in the house
Speaker 2: for a while because like they can't just leave they
Speaker 2: don't have enough money. She concludes the house was built
Speaker 2: on an old Native burial ground, and when she I do,
Speaker 2: Gary's a bad guy. But I love his response to it,
Speaker 2: because She's like, we're built this house was built on
Speaker 2: an Indian burial ground, and Gary says, so what, I'm
Speaker 2: sure someone's buried pretty much everywhere where are we supposed
Speaker 2: to live in mid air? Not a bad response, So
Speaker 2: per Sylvia, there's a bunch of storms that hit the house,
Speaker 2: and then Gary loses his cop job and the family
Speaker 2: moves to California. Her parents move with them, and they
Speaker 2: like live next door in a duplex, but the marriage
Speaker 2: continues to degrade. Sylvia has an emotional affair with a
Speaker 2: creative writing professor who's into the occult and who starts
Speaker 2: giving her occult books like Helena Blovotsky's Theosophy books to
Speaker 2: read and tells her like, you're a great psychic and
Speaker 2: you have to use your powers to change the world.
Speaker 2: And then he dies very suddenly and tragically. I have
Speaker 2: no idea. I can't verify this guy's existence, so I
Speaker 2: don't know if he was real, or if she just
Speaker 2: invented him because he was narratively convenient. But after this point,
Speaker 2: she leaves Gary, they get divorced, and she takes there
Speaker 2: now two children with her. She meets a new man
Speaker 2: shortly thereafter, a guy named Dal, and they move into
Speaker 2: a house together while she completes her hypnotism classes to
Speaker 2: become a master hypnotist, and she's starting to practice primarily
Speaker 2: as like a psychic. She's not doing a lot of
Speaker 2: professional hypnotism right now. She's doing readings on people, and
Speaker 2: she's sometimes giving like speeches and stuff to classes, and
Speaker 2: that's kind of how she's making her living. I think
Speaker 2: Dal is primarily supporting her at this point, but she's
Speaker 2: starting to build up her career. And we'll talk about
Speaker 2: what comes next, but first adds and we're back. So
Speaker 2: my favorite detail from this period of time after she
Speaker 2: moves in with her new husband is that one day,
Speaker 2: Sylvia's cooking dinner for her family and she starts a
Speaker 2: massive grease fire that nearly kills her, and she's rescued
Speaker 2: from the grease fire by a spirit that looks to
Speaker 2: be a young woman in her thirties. Francine informs her
Speaker 2: that this spirit was really Grandma Ada and got her
Speaker 2: read this is my favorite chunk of her whole stupid book.
Speaker 2: I gotta read this to you, guys. I impatiently pointed
Speaker 2: out to Harry that Grandma Ada's hair was white. It
Speaker 2: was blonde when she was thirty. She said, all spirits
Speaker 2: on the other side are thirty years old? Why are
Speaker 2: they thirty? Considering all the years I had been communicating
Speaker 2: with her, I should have seen this answer coming. Because
Speaker 2: they are. I couldn't argue with that.
Speaker 4: Thirty thirty.
Speaker 3: Thirty because they are, because they are.
Speaker 2: God was like, you know what the right age is?
Speaker 2: Thirty thirty thirty?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's giving jonnither Gardner, it's giving thirteen
Speaker 5: going on thirty thirty thirty and thriving thirty.
Speaker 3: I think that shows us that she actually believed this.
Speaker 2: She has to have to some extent right.
Speaker 3: She must have believed that, because if you're if you're
Speaker 3: not gonna bother to justify it with anything other than
Speaker 3: they said, because it's just that's how it is, Like, damn,
Speaker 3: you're in deep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's such a It's also just objectively, like, you
Speaker 2: know what age people want to be when they're on
Speaker 2: the other side forever, the age when their knees started
Speaker 2: to give out. That's the perfect age now in their
Speaker 2: early twenties when you could like drink like a sieve
Speaker 2: or whatever, like thirty. Yeah. So not long after this,
Speaker 2: she and Dal go to see a famous psychic give
Speaker 2: a lecture. Sylvia very decently doesn't name this psychic because
Speaker 2: they were still practicing at the time the book came
Speaker 2: out and she didn't want to start beef. But Sylvia
Speaker 2: is very offended at how we ignorant this psychic is.
Speaker 2: And she's particularly offended because the psychic takes credit for
Speaker 2: her gift, for having for their gift right that like,
Speaker 2: this is my gift, I'm special as the psychic, and
Speaker 2: Sylvia believes that you have to give God credit for everything, right,
Speaker 2: So she's kind of offended at that, and she's just
Speaker 2: in general angry that this woman's getting a lot of
Speaker 2: important details wrong. So she turns to her husband Dal
Speaker 2: and she expresses fury that this has quote a whole
Speaker 2: audience sitting there looking for answers, looking for comfort about
Speaker 2: their deceased loved ones. All no they got back was
Speaker 2: a bunch of double talk lies in half truths, which
Speaker 2: is a very ironic sentence to come out of the
Speaker 2: lady whose whole career is going to be lying to
Speaker 2: people about their dead left ones later and sometimes they're
Speaker 2: a lie of loved ones who aren't dead. Her husband
Speaker 2: dal I don't know, maybe he just wanted to, like
Speaker 2: get her to stop yelling. But he's like, why don't
Speaker 2: you do something about it? If you're so much better
Speaker 2: of a psychic in this lady, you know, why don't
Speaker 2: you become a big psychic and start giving psychic lectures?
Speaker 2: And so Sylvia does. She founds the Nirvana Foundation of
Speaker 2: Psychic Research, a registered nonprofit in California, in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 2: Her stated goal with this is to create a new
Speaker 2: religion right to like, or at least to augment the
Speaker 2: existing world religions. You get the feelings part of it.
Speaker 2: She wants to like correct the other religions. She thinks
Speaker 2: they all got pieces right, but they don't know that
Speaker 2: you're thirty forever when you're dead. You know, that's not
Speaker 2: in the Bible. We gotta pencil that in, right.
Speaker 3: Sounds like so he didn't want to pay their taxes.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Oh yeah, that's right, you've hit the nail
Speaker 2: on the head whenever someone wants to start her religion.
Speaker 2: So she starts running ads in the newspaper for classes,
Speaker 2: and it being the nineteen seventies, people show up. Sylvia
Speaker 2: gets so many students that regrettably, and she hates this.
Speaker 2: She hates to do this. Oh, she has to start
Speaker 2: charging the money. It breaks her heart. She has to
Speaker 2: get money from these people.
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, I have to scam the people I'm scamming.
Speaker 2: There's just too many of them for me to not
Speaker 2: take your money.
Speaker 4: Oh can I not take advantage of these people?
Speaker 2: Quote? I had been offering for free for so many years,
Speaker 2: but for one thing, it was the only way we
Speaker 2: could afford to make a full time commitment to the foundation.
Speaker 2: For another thing, as more and more people have been
Speaker 2: pointing out to be making a living, putting one's gifts
Speaker 2: to work is pretty much the definition of virtually every
Speaker 2: career you can name. So long as I devoted by
Speaker 2: gifts to God's greatest good, I had no reason to apologize.
Speaker 2: I don't know that that is the definition of every
Speaker 2: virtually every career you can name, Like putting like we
Speaker 2: all like to think that that's the case. But I
Speaker 2: don't know if I think like most of the people
Speaker 2: I know who like worked as a bank teller weren't
Speaker 2: like I'm putting my gifts to work. They were like, well,
Speaker 2: I needed a job while I was in college, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I need something to do.
Speaker 3: I can teach acting classes for free.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So true to her word though, after this point,
Speaker 2: Sylvia is not going to apologize for anything she does
Speaker 2: over the next fifty years. We have now that's a
Speaker 2: sign of prospers threshold. Yeah, and she she is going
Speaker 2: to be from this point forward making money full time
Speaker 2: off of her psychic research. She's going to start hiring people,
Speaker 2: bring them in and expanding the Nirvana Foundation, And by
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five or so, she is a full time
Speaker 2: psychic teaching classes and extrasensory skills like dream interpretation, and
Speaker 2: becoming increase in like prominent within like the kooky world
Speaker 2: of New Age thought as that starts to kind of
Speaker 2: explode in the mid seventies through the early eighties. She's
Speaker 2: one of these people who's like in Southern California giving
Speaker 2: obvious it's always in Southern California, like giving classes and
Speaker 2: putting out books and pamphlets on like how the psychic
Speaker 2: world is supposed to work, and there's very much this
Speaker 2: idea that like, we're treating this like a science, and
Speaker 2: so we'll see how this science develops. Cal in part two.
Speaker 2: How are you feeling at the end of part one
Speaker 2: about our friend Sylvia?
Speaker 4: Yeah? What do you think of Sylvia so far?
Speaker 3: I appreciate this backstory because I knew I grew up
Speaker 3: in the nineties, so I remember, like when you were
Speaker 3: stick home from school, like with a flu on the
Speaker 3: couch watching just bad daytime shows. She was a fixture
Speaker 3: of a lot of them, I guess Montella especially. I
Speaker 3: don't remember what I would watch back in the day,
Speaker 3: but I remember that, and I remember just there was
Speaker 3: like the gap obviously a college after once the Internet
Speaker 3: comes around YouTube, and then obviously now social media, like
Speaker 3: these clips that circulate of her. I have that weird
Speaker 3: memory of remembering that as a kid, but then not
Speaker 3: knowing anything else about her. So all of that was
Speaker 3: very interesting, and I guess I didn't realize how troubled
Speaker 3: she was from such an early age. And I'm trying
Speaker 3: to use that term generously instead of saying that she
Speaker 3: was a fraud or whatever. Like it just sounds like
Speaker 3: whether whether she actually believes this or whether it was
Speaker 3: a it was a calculated fraud. She doesn't sound well
Speaker 3: from the beginning, right, No.
Speaker 2: No, And I think it's probably accurate to think that
Speaker 2: this doesn't Nobody starts, or at least very few people start,
Speaker 2: you know, the way she would say, mapping it out.
Speaker 2: She's not as a twenty year old or whatever, mapping
Speaker 2: out and then I'm going to light at people about
Speaker 2: their kidnapped relatives. Yeah, right, this is this is a
Speaker 2: kid who she's got a difficult home life. You know,
Speaker 2: she's got a grandma who makes her feel special. I
Speaker 2: don't have trouble believing because a lot of people could
Speaker 2: have experiences like an older and though I'm a little touched,
Speaker 2: I've got a little bit of of the gift or whatever.
Speaker 2: And her grandma probably certainly didn't say everything that she
Speaker 2: puts in her grandma's mouth, but she probably said a
Speaker 2: few things. And then Sylvia expands the lore over time
Speaker 2: because it makes her feel special and comforted, and you know,
Speaker 2: things snowball and eventually you get a lot less ethical.
Speaker 2: You start making compromises to keep it going. You find opportunities,
Speaker 2: and I do think you like breaking bad is a
Speaker 2: more gradual experience for a lot of these people. You know,
Speaker 2: they're not all l Ron Hubbard who came out of
Speaker 2: the gate like I'm gonna con as many people as
Speaker 2: I can. We can't all be LRH, though we might
Speaker 2: wish we could. Well, cal you want to plug your
Speaker 2: show again before you're all out here?
Speaker 3: Sure. I'm the host of a podcast called Here we
Speaker 3: Go Again, where we look at the past, present, and
Speaker 3: future of specific topics. You can think of it as
Speaker 3: like a place where you can have fun, make some jokes,
Speaker 3: but at the end of the episode, feel like you've
Speaker 3: actually learned a little bit of something, a little bit
Speaker 3: of a maybe like a little just tiny tiny bit
Speaker 3: of hope about the topics that we cover.
Speaker 2: A tiny bit of hope sounds incredibly generous for twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six, So I am looking forward to that. You
Speaker 2: all should be too. All right, everybody, until Thursday, this
Speaker 2: has been Behind the Bastards. We'll be back and like
Speaker 2: a day or so. You know how this all works.
Speaker 2: We've been doing this for almost ten years.
Speaker 1: Sweets Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone
Speaker 1: Media for more from cool Zone Media. Visit our website
Speaker 1: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video
Speaker 1: episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,
Speaker 1: dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix
Speaker 1: you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older
Speaker 1: episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube
Speaker 1: dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about
Speaker 1: forty percent of you, statistically speaking,